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21 " Houses built on bridges are scandals. A bridge wants to not be. If it could choose its shape, a bridge would be no shape, "
― China Miéville , This Census-Taker
22 " On the hill we used a different, vaguer calendar than the one I’ve since learned. The seasons ours described—summer, dimming, and winter—were suited to a different place: the mountain had two seasons at most. "
23 " My father didn’t look at me. He dropped more stones upon a random-looking cairn. The townspeople were slow to get out of our sight. He waited and watched them and didn’t look at me and kept adding to the substance of the hill with the substance of the hill. "
24 " I didn’t move: I had no moving left in me. "
25 " And I who months before had run into town screaming my accusation was shy to say it now that I was asked to put it in clear words. I’d grown used to this world in which everyone knew what had happened or what I said had, in which it had gone from being spoken to being unspoken again, a secret everybody knew. Here I was, hesitating to speak it. I took persuading. "
26 " The children from the bridge were often waiting there, eyeing me. They congregated by the stump and played a game involving motions as strange as those of worship. To me it looked as if they were feeling the missing bark for handholds, as if it were an expertise of town children that they could climb ghost trees. "
27 " The branches dropped shaggy creepers that, when they reached the earth, hardened into roots and pried apart paving. "
28 " The manager of my line told me, You never put anything down except to be read. Every word ever written is written to be read and if some go unread that‘s only chance, failure, they‘re like grubs that die without changing. "
29 " Once I said to my father, 'Why do you want me?'I still think that's the bravest thing I've ever done. "
30 " I hoped the hunter would come. I imagined him pushing through the thickets in the foothills. I've thought of him like that often since, as if he's still out there, game in his sights, intending to check on me on his return. "
31 " He said, You'll write it not because there's no possibility it'll be found but because it costs too much to not write it. "
32 " A bridge wants to not be. If it could choose its shape, a bridge would be no shape, an unspace to link One-place-town to Another-place-town over a river or a road or a tangle of railway tracks or a quarry, or to attach an island to another island or to the continent from which it strains. The dream of a bridge is of a woman standing at one side of a gorge and stepping out as if her job is to die, but when her foot falls it meets the ground right on the other side. A bridge is just better than no bridge but its horizon is gaplessness, and the fact of itself should still shame it. "
33 " This was the first time any adult had hit me. The window-cleaner winced with every strike. I felt better and worse that even a man such as he counted this punishment unfair. He did not intervene. "
34 " A boy ran down a hill path screaming. The boy was I. "
35 " You told all this to the people in the town,” he said. “They said they can’t do anything because of no proof. "